On a warm September evening in 1991 my husband, our daughter, a family friend and I were standing on a busy street in downtown Toronto. We had come for a short visit from our small Northern Ontario town and had just finished dinner at Movenpick. All evening, the atmosphere had been tense. My daughter did not talk to me and she kept throwing hate-filled glances at her father.

We were worried. For some time, we had been aware that she was seeing a psychotherapist, and we had noticed a profound, negative change in her behaviour toward us. We wanted to talk, to ask questions, but the presence of our friend prevented that. We were hoping for a private opportunity later in the evening, but after a few awkward moments, my daughter shake hands with the family friend and without a word to us, she turned and walked away.

This rather uneventful evening will be etched in my memory for the years to come, since it will be forever associated with the disappearance of my daughter from my life. No, she did not die the next day I n a car crash. She was hit by a fast-moving out-of-control train driven by the most pernicious fad of the last decade. It came to be known as “recovered memory therapy”. She was snatched from us, without much warning, by a therapy cult.

Shortly after our Toronto visit my daughter indicated that she did not want to see us any more. For a while, we maintained sporadic contact through phone calls, which were always initiated by her father or by me. Five years ago, she cut even this thin thread.

Back in 1991, it took several months before we uncovered the roots of her irrational hostility. Finally, she had revealed that through the guidance of her therapist, she had recovered memories of the most horrendous sexual abuse that her father supposedly perpetrated upon her for many years, while I looked the other way. She admitted that she had been completely unaware of this abuse until after an extensive “memory work” with her therapist.

We were horrified. We could only think that she had fallen prey to a mentally ill doctor. We could not imagine that a person of a sound mind would, without question, accept that father would rape his three-year-old daughter with her mother’s tacit approval, and that this criminal activity could go on for years without being remembered by the child or noticed by the rest of the family, by babysitters, teachers or the family doctor. We concluded that this doctor had to be a delusional pervert who was imposing his sick fantasies upon our vulnerable daughter at a time when she was very distressed.

At first we thought that we were the only people in the world hit by the fallout from this obscene manipulation masquerading as therapy. But after our story was published in the Toronto Star in May 1992, we were flooded with phone calls and letters from people in similar situation. It was a great but sad relief to find that we were not alone in this terrible predicament. We came to understand that there were therapists who were using memory retrieval techniques on patients with a variety of problems ranging all the way from anorexia to zoophobia.

We started reading, speaking to professionals and networking with other affected families. We desperately wanted to understand what had happened to our daughter and what could be done in to return her life to normal. Gradually, we learned more about memory retrieval therapy. This fad, which started in the mid-to-late 80’s, was based on an unsubstantiated belief that the human mind has the capacity to completely banish memories of extremely traumatic events of a sexual nature, and then to recover these memories in more or less pristine form years or even decades later. Although this concept flies in the face of common human experience—and anyone with common sense must shake his or her head in disbelief at this nonsense—the notion of “repression” and “recovery” of traumatic memories of sexual abuse spread like a bush fire in relatively small but powerful, ideologically motivated subculture of mental health care providers.

After two years, my daughter left her original therapist and in time ended up with a female psychiatrist, a member of the Canadian Psychiatric Association. This woman not only uncritically accepted my daughter’s absurd “memories”, she actually helped her “recover” more of them. In order to facilitate the recovery of memories of being abused by her grandfather, my daughter started visiting her grandfather’s grave. Gradually, her irrational hatred spread to other family members, including her dying grandmother, whom she refused to see, although she loved her dearly in the pre-therapy years. In the interim, she lost her job, broke up with her spouse, and started moving from shelter to shelter, living off government handouts. Her newly-found “memories” became the center of her universe. Her family and her pre-therapy friends had been replaced by people who lent support to her delusional beliefs.

Although my daughter is the primary victim of this tragic fad, my life has also been profoundly affected. Before the therapist filled her with bottomless hatred and paranoid fear, my daughter and I were best of friend, sharing many interests. We both enjoyed hiking, and spent countless hours walking and talking. We always looked forward to our traditional hike in Killarney Park on the Thanksgiving weekend. We shared the same taste in books and movies. I miss her and I worry about her. The passage of time has not diminished my grief. There is no closure, just everlasting apprehension. I know that she was hospitalized at one point because she was suicidal and I fear for her life.

When I wake up in the morning or in the middle of the night, my first thoughts are of her. What does she do? Is she safe? Is she healthy? How does she cope? Then I think about her psychiatrist, a woman I’ve never met. I try to understand her motivation, her way of thinking. She is a true puzzle to me. Is she a caring human being who has caused harm unintentionally and ho now realizes her mistake but does not know how to make it right? Does she wake up in a cold sweat, overwhelmed by doubt and remorse? Or is she callously indifferent to the therapy-induced suffering of her patient? How can she, an educated intelligent woman believe in this “repressed-and-recovered memory” nonsense? And how can she, a professional with mostly female clientele, believe for a moment that an emotionally stable and financially independent mother—or any mother for that matter—would allow her husband to rape her daughter repeatedly from the age of three, and do nothing about it? What kind of perverted perception does this female psychiatrist have about women?

I have spent the last ten years as an activist, a role I never dreamed of in the pre-accusation days. I work hard at exposing the harm caused by the recovered memory movement and I strive for mental health care reform. Love for my daughter is my driving force. If this situation were not so sad, I would be very fulfilled by what I am doing. In the past several years I have helped many people, and I have learned profound lessons about human nature. I’ve met wonderful people among the accused and their families, and I have become friends with some of the brightest professionals in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and the law. I was touched by their deep commitment to justice and by their social responsibility. These people voiced their critique of the recovered memory movement early on and opened themselves to vulgar attacks and intimidation. They have my admiration and respect.

I’ve also had my share of disappointments. When this all started in 1991, I thought that professional organizations and licensing boards—the very institutions which are suppose to protect the public from quackery—would act swiftly and decisively. Ten years later, I am still waiting.

The Science and Politics of Recovered Memory